Gaming Ballistic’s Firing Squad welcome Doug Davison of Fantasy Grounds

Douglas Cole (Gaming Ballistic): Good evening, and welcome to Gaming Ballistic’s
Firing Squad. This is a continuation of a series of interviews that we are
doing for the Roleplaying Game Blog Association March Blog Carnival. The topic for
this month is virtual tabletops and online gaming, and I am pleased to welcome
to the firing squad Doug Davison from Fantasy Grounds. Thank you for joining us
this evening.

Doug Davison (Content Creator of Fantasy Grounds): Thanks for having me, Doug.

Douglas Cole:
So what is your position and role in Fantasy Grounds? You’re the Lead Developer I believe?

Doug Davison:
I’m actually the President, we’re a two-person company, basically. We both do a
little bit of development, John Gregor is the other developer, and he’s been
kind  of taking over the lead development
role lately, and I’ve been managing the contracting – getting new contracts in
and taking over the web. And some development. Whenever time permits.

Douglas Cole:
Excellent. So how long has Fantasy Grounds been a thing? When did it first go
live?

Doug Davison:
It first went live in 2005, if I remember correctly. It was developed
originally by three gentlemen out in Finland. We purchased the company from
them in 2009. I acquired the company, and then brought John in, and we were
both community members at that point in time.

We were users of the
software in a sense, and we were both developers of software by trade, so we
found how easy it was to extend the product, and to make it customized and we
saw what it needed to be. And John had actually written a Dungeons and Dragons
4th edition rule set for it and I had written some Star Wars Saga
edition rules set for it.

We just kind of on a whim
made a offer to them, and acquired the company and we’ve had it sense.

Douglas Cole:
Excellent. The question that I was going to sort of ask was what lead you to
developing VTT, but since it was already sort of extent, what was so compelling
about it that you wanted to form a company and acquire it yourself?

Doug Davison:
I think it was the extensibility of it. To see how powerful the setup was, to
get in and make our own content.

John had come in and he
had done a lot of work from other virtual tabletops. There is one called
Kludgeworks, I think it’s still out there. We had both looked at Maptools and
the other tools that were out there, and just from a user perspective we both
gravitated towards Fantasy Grounds at some time. I think it was the look and
feel, it was very well polished, I think it was well-designed, and well-planned
from a architecture point of view. As a software developer it just fit very
well for me.

Douglas Cole:
It’s the extension of the rules, you mentioned that your partner had done
Dungeons and Dragons, and you had done Star Wars. Is this something that you
really have to be a coder to extend, or can Joe Blow get in there and make a
rules set?

Doug Davison:
To make a rule set you absolutely do have to be a coder to do much substantial.
If you’re going to take a basic rule set that basically only needs a few tweaks
here and there and add some extra functionality or customize one aspect, you
can kind of go out there and see how those things were done in the past. Lots
of trial and error basically.

I would say to do one from
scratch you would absolutely have to be a coder. XML is kind of used to lay out
the graphics. So a lot of times people will reskin it and they won’t have any
coding background. They’re just able to open up the XML files, see how things
are laid out – we have a lot of documentation and a lot of support for other developers
and artists to go in and modify it.

Douglas Cole:
Okay. Talking broadly about virtual tabletops and gaming aids, what do you
think that the most important features are in
general for…so what are the best and worst features of a virtual tabletops?

Doug Davison:
I think different people look for different things in virtual tabletops. We
even see that from one rule set to the next rule set.

Some systems really focus
heavily on movement on a tactical grid or combat, it’s all about the automation
or knowing where your character is in relation to the other characters,
monsters, NPCs, and so forth. Some systems, like Call of Cthulhu, are more
story driven, so you want a better focus on being able to do handouts for the players
to set the mood, see the tone with them within the game so that kind of drives.

So that’s one of the
things I really like about Fantasy Grounds. I saw it had the capability to do
most of those things for a each player.

Setup is really important,
you have to be able to setup and run quickly. Ideally you should be able to run
it from the seat of your pants if you want to.

Or, if you are the type of
GM that prepares long things in advance you should be able to prepare those
things.

I think it kind of caters
to Fantasy Grounds specifically because it caters to lots of those different
audiences. There are other virtual tabletops that do one or more of those
aspects and it may be better than Fantasy Grounds. But I think collectively,
that Fantasy Grounds brings a lot of those functions to the table.

Douglas Cole:
So why don’t we take the opportunity to bring up a view of Fantasy Grounds, so
you can walk us through some of the coolest features.

Doug Davison:
I’m going to start off with a view of the players’ screen, from there we can
expand out.

If we were to look from
the…so this is what a player would see within the Pathfinder-compatible rule
set. So the D&D ones will look very similar, even GURPS has the kind of
same basic feel, though with different attributes and skills, maybe the
automation is different depending on what it is.

In a sense, almost every
game system you’re going to play it’s going to have a form of a character
sheet. That’s one of the things that Fantasy Grounds does very well,
especially in rules designs. There are about 25 or so rule sets out there that
are supported.

Here’s an example of where
you got your Strength, and stats or whatever and you can kind of just come in
and fill out your character values. You’ll see that it does have a little bit
of automation with the modifiers. Your modifiers change and you can kind of
change those on the fly.

You see this little dice
box here, you can actually pick it up and when you roll that dice into the chat
window this shares that dice roll with every other connected player. So here it
has the portrait of the player who rolled it, the d20 with the modifier and the
total results and you can kind of double-click on those as well and they will
roll and share it.

There are a couple of
things going on here. One is the chat window which is shared, so as multiple
players are logging in they can say things like “Let’s go” and attack and so
forth. So I think this kind of gives you a running log.

One of our community
members built a chat log scrubber.  So
this is saved to disc after each session and you can post it up at the
conclusion of their games so if someone had to bail out of the game early they
can see what happened. You can edit that out and determine if you want to share
the dice rolls so you only get the story portion is there.

Douglas Cole:
Huh. That’s really neat. One of the things that I like to do, I’ve played
Pathfinder, Swords and Wizardry, some GURPS, even some Trail of Cthulhu once or
twice, while I’m not running the game I like to transcribe. I’ll actually frequently
throw up a blog post almost within minutes of the game being over, and one of
the things that I’ll do is pull from the chat logs because sometimes people put
things in chats that are just cool, or hysterical, or whatever. That ability to
do the chat is pretty cool.

Is there a capability for
multiple chat windows?

Doug Davison:
There is not. But there is some basic support. Like if I was to go through…we
have some general kind of help commands, there is some generic commands.

You can whisper to each
other, to another character, to the GM, to both. You can do a vote, for
instance: The GM can launch and say “Are we ready to continue on?” then it
would basically prop that to each player. So if you had four or five players connected,
you could check and say “We’re all ready to proceed” after your bathroom breaks
and that sort of thing.

You can do those basic
functions that you would see in a MMO or something like that.

Then you also have a chat
window, an action window, depending on what you do you can hold a key – a shift
or alt key – and change the mode. Are you going to emote something or be out of
character and say “I need a break” then you can hold down and go out of
character as it colors it differently.

Douglas Cole:
So effectively, you’ve got multiple chat windows within the same window.

Doug Davison:
Exactly. They all go under the same window.

There is also all of your
dice rolls drop in there.

You can also see a dice
tower here in the corner. Let’s say you got some combat and some skills, if the
GM were to whisper to you and say “I want you to…” you’re trying to sneak past
a goblin, maybe you have to roll a Stealth roll, but he doesn’t want you to
know if you’re successful or not.

Let me give him some
actual ability here. So he’s got a +2 Stealth, he would drop that in the box.
It’ll say I’ve rolled a hidden roll, and I had a +2 to that and then the GM
will see he actually got a seven and he can choose to share that later on if he
wants, or let the story unfold and play out accordingly.

So as the player sneaks
past the goblin or thinks he successful at the last second the goblin swings
out with his hammer and hits him on the toe, or whatever the case may be.

Douglas Cole:
Neat. So you mentioned that it’s got multiple support: Pathfinder is a good one
to support, and you could end there, but it sounds like you have 20 or 25
systems that you could also do.

You sent me a link to a
neat demo on how to export from GURPS character sheet to Fantasy Grounds and I
will link that later. I haven’t seen the full capability of the GURPS rules
support, but it exists, so from my perspective it’s one up on many sets, which
is kind of neat.

Doug Davison:
The installs on these custom rules sets . . . whenever we’ve had a rules set that’s
been out in the community and it’s been vetted to a certain extent, doesn’t
have…it obviously can’t have any propriety content owned by publishers.

We kind of review that
before we post it up on our system. We do have a wiki linked directly on our
webpage with a list of every rule set we have supported. You click through to
that and each entry will have directions to install it and it’s seriously like
a five minute install. You download the files, put it in the right folder, and
click new campaign and you have the option to create a GURPS campaign or D&D
4th edition campaign or whatever.

Douglas Cole:
So as you do campaign creation as a game master, I happen to be working up a
campaign right now “GURPS Alien Menace,” which is going to be a mash-up of X-COM,
Monster Hunters, little bit of the second Aliens movie, kind of Dungeon Fantasy
in space: go to the alien planet, kill them, and take their stuff.

As I’m working the
campaign up, let’s say I import the GURPS rule set, as a game master how do I
do maps or NPCs or bring in…or lets going to pretend I’m going to do all of
that in Pathfinder, because you’ve got that up and it’s easy.

So how do I walk through
campaign locations or maps or whatever?

Doug Davison:
Let me switch right back to the screen share real quick, this time I’m going to
show you the GM’s view, basically.

So this one…if I can
follow that. I don’t know…I think I’m showing you the player one.

Douglas Cole:
Do you have multiple instances of the program open?

Doug Davison:
I do, actually, and that’s one of the things that’s nice for budding GMs or
people who are new to Fantasy Guards. Sometimes it takes a little bit to see what
is a player going to see when I do this operation of the game?

So here, as a example, you
can pull up any of the characters that are logged in. The players…I can see all
sort of stuff that they can. If they have a question about their character I
can see their skills and abilities and here’s examples of having content linked
that is clickable. It pulls up more information about what that skill or feat
has.

I can create my own
character, say I want to play a playable character for a while. I would just go
in and create a new character here. Add a character. Fill out a new character sheet
and when a new player logs in, or an existing player, they can take control of
this character and then run that character.

The nice thing that you
can do from building your campaigns you can build a set of stories. I’m going
to show you a example of one of our stories which is actually a product you can
purchase.

We try to support a lot of
different content publishers. Here is a example of a OGL product – Crypt of the
Sun Lord – this one is actually by the Adventure a Week folks. I don’t know if
you’ve talked to them in the past.

Douglas Cole:
I haven’t talked to them, but Liz Theis from Realm Works (from Lone Wolf Development)
mentioned them several times as really cool content creators.

Doug Davison:
They just did a Kickstarter for Rise of the Drow, and they’re working on
converting that to Fantasy Grounds as well.

But all of these screens
here are really just text. You can type whatever you want. I can come through
and edit this kind of like you would a word documents. You can add document and
say “This is a tomb” so if you’re a big prepper of if you wanted to share this
adventure later, or if you’re a content creator, you can come in and say…you
can make it look professional.

Someone else can come in
later and read all the content. You can organize your GMs notes…let’s see if
there is a adventure hub, all of these are linked to other sections of the…let
me see if I can get to…okay, here is a example of some boxed text.

So they could if they were
on Skype or Google Hangout they could read this when they got to that part – or
a combination where they click this little button and share it with the window.
It writes it out in the chat window so all the logged in players will see that.

And then you can branching
scripts and that sort of thing. If the PCs make a successful Sense Motive roll,
I’ll share this information or that information, and then with your images you
can click and pull up a image…let me shrink this down.

So here you could just
right click and share that image, and now the players will see that. I’m only
showing the one screen on my share…but that basically pops up instantly on the
players’ window. Then you can also choose to share with just individual players
by dragging the image to that player’s portrait.

For instance, if the part
was to split up and go multiple directions and the one guy walks in on a
beholder you can just share that with him.

Douglas Cole:
Surely, no one would ever split the party…

Doug Davison:
No one ever does that, but we support it if they do.

Right.

So here’s some examples,
this one is really nicely organized. If you wanted to add more content after
this section, say a image after this image, you can just type and say “I want a
new image.” Image two or whatever, give it a probably nicer name, then you go
to a list of all your images, and here is a link to the folder, so you could
just store a image you downloaded from the internet. I guess the screen share
is not going to show that one. It just pops up in there. The image instantly
becomes available. Then you just drag it, and it makes that linkable.

Douglas Cole:
Very cool.

Doug Davison:
Then when you’re ready to launch that image, you just click it, and it shows
up. And that one is…I guess it’s just a big burlap sack. I don’t know what that
particular image is.

Douglas Cole:
The inside of a bag of holding.

Doug Davison:
Evidently.

So here is a example, you
have a GM map. The other nice thing is you can link story entries to the map.

So here is area 6 for
instance, if you were to link area 6 to where it says six you could just hold
down the shift key and it’ll make a pushpin. I’ve got that. I’ve got seven.
I’ve got five.

Very quickly, if you
develop all your content in advance when you develop your map you can say “I’m
going to go down this hallway.” You click on it, and this is your room
description and any combats that might occur in that room. Here is an encounter
with a black bear, so in this case if you were developing this, you would
create a new encounter – a blank one – and enter in any monsters you might
have.

You could pull that from
like a library. Here’s the list of d20 monsters that are available. It comes
with a bestiary of d20 SRD content available.

So maybe I want to do a
dire bat, so you drag that into your encounter. If your encounter is not tough
enough by default and you just assign a token…let me show you where…if I can
find a bat. This will work. That will probably look like a bat.

Drop it in there, and say
I’ve got three of those for instance, and you’re ready to have your combat
encounter. Here’s all of your stats for your NPCs, and again you can just
unlock this and type in some new…this is read-only. I’m in a module right now,
but these are clickable so your bite attack adds your modifier with a bite.

You can actually roll this
on the player directly as well. So the combat tab is where a lot of the
times…once you have your NPCs…I’m sorry, I’m hopping around a lot here. Let’s
say they had this encounter with a black bear…

Douglas Cole:
And three bats…

Doug Davison:
Then you just…when you’re ready to run that encounter you click on this button
that says “Add to Combat Tracker” it adds them in, rolls their initiative, if
you have prep and set and then you’re off and ready to go.

On the maps…let me see if
I have a map here too. I need an encounter map. Let’s see. The same thing. You
would basically position them where they are on the map…part this. And then you
could say this … he’s big.

Douglas Cole:
[laughs] This is one of those cases where it’s “How did the dragon get into a
20×20 ft room?”

Doug Davison:
Exactly. Then you’ll see here it’s kind of greyed out – that’s because he’s
invisible. As soon as he becomes visible to the players you can make him as
visible.

The same sort of thing if
you mask it, and as they move in and out of your masked area, you can reveal
parts of the map as you explore. That’s kind of the guys moving around on a
map.

Let me put the player so I
can show you what we consider some of the coolest features. So you’ve got your
player here and here. And then when you’re ready to do this bat’s attack…I
think it’s actually…I’m going to throw out some of these goblins since we don’t
have goblins in this particular encounter.

Douglas Cole:
I love the little dead guy icon.

Doug Davison:
Yeah [laughs]. So we have basically…we’ve scaled it down a bit: there is one
bat.

Yeah. So it’s this guys
turn. Jonah’s turn. As a player I’ll show you in a second. As the GM when it
becomes the bats turn…here is a quick list of the most common things you might
do. He’s really only got a bite attack. If I wanted to see his full stats I go
here. Did he have a perception? Does he success noticing the guy in the
background. Normally I have my screen a little bit larger…

Douglas Cole:
Yeah, he rolled a 29, I think he saw people.

Doug Davison:
He saw them I guess. If you want to share that with players they can see that
in the chat window. When you’re ready to do your attack you just drag your bite
attack, drop it on the target and it’ll come back and tell you you missed or
your hit or whatever.

Let me expand this a
little more. Hopefully it’s viewable for you guys.

Douglas Cole:
Yeah, you’ve got a couple more inches on either side of my screen.

Doug Davison:
Let me make it larger than this. I’m not quite using as much real estate as I
normally do. I normally run it across two monitors is what I traditionally do.
I find that gives me lots of room.

You’ll see that the attack
was just a 12 and it automatically rolled against his Dexterity. In something
like fourth edition, this thing is a God-send for combat. Because they have all
sorts of attacks and sometimes they affect your Reflex or your AC, and the
attack is actually coded for what it’s rolling against on the target. So again
in this situation, you missed and you move on. Had you hit…let me get rid of
some more screens here.

Had you hit you hover over
the damage portion…a 1d8+4, you drop it on the character, see it increased the
damage and now he’s got 18 points of damage on him. It added 11 and I guess he
had 7 before. It allows you to automate combat very quickly.

Let me just move this guy,
I assume he can make it all that movement. As the bear moves down to this guy,
you got your claw attack or a bite attack. You can see as a hover over each one
I can pick up and roll it separately. That can be your one claw attack for
instance, or your bite attack and it’s really as you type it in.

So if I wanted to give him
a new attack, let’s say he’s got a tail attack maybe some spell that gives him
a tentacle tail or whatever. Say tentacle and use the same format – so it’s
1d6+8 and it’s actually tentacle +9.

Now as I hover over I got
a tentacle attack. I can drop that and it shares that I got a tentacle attack.

Another thing that is nice
from a GM perspective is you got your modifiers. So if for some reason it’s a
+2 modifier on the next roll for whatever reason, that same attack it’ll roll
it and share I got a tentacle attack +2, if gave me a total of +11.

Those things will add up
and it’ll give a whole series of different things you might add on for
different things. Especially like 4th edition D&D and Pathfinder
there are all kinds of things…say I’m Power Attacking and let’s say give him
another modifier or combat advantage or whatever.

It’ll give a +2 to that,
so as I add these things in he’s got a -1 from that, but a +2 from flanking so
he has a net +1. So let’s say he’s also blessed, so I’m going to add a bless in
there. Because typically you’ve got wizards in the party throwing…

Douglas Cole:
Oh sure…[crosstalk]

Doug Davison:
[crosstalk] Buffs and debuffs and all those things add up so this kind of gives
you a running total of all the modifiers on your next attack roll.

Douglas Cole:
And it looks like each little dot is an individual modifier you can look at.

Doug Davison:
And you can remove them the same way too. I load all of these up, and the GM is
looking at the same screen and he’s saying “You got all these things, you need
to take off your flank attack” or whatever and I remove it and now I have
blessed offset by my Power Attack which is a -1. So if you want to add it back
in you add your flank and when you roll your attack it should demonstrate…so
here is the attack roll. It’s basically a Power Attack, you have a -1 from
Power Attack…

Douglas Cole:
Oh, it labels it all. That’s neat.

Doug Davison:
So everybody knows how you got to your magic number. Sometimes we all
know..we’ve gamed with players who’s math doesn’t quite add up to the same
result you have.

So that kind of alleviates
that and it does it all on the fly.

The other thing that’s
nice, it looks for the keyword “And” so here is the full attack option for this
character. So it has 2 claw attacks and a bite each with a modifier and stuff
going on there.

So as you can see it’ll
pick up 3 dice and as it roll them it’ll tell me which ones hit or miss. In
this case it was a critical hit. It rolled automatically. I don’t have my
critical hit table turned on. That’s a table you can customize. It
automatically  roll on that and tell you
what the result is.

Douglas Cole:
I wonder if the GURPS rules set automated the critical hit table or not.

Doug Davison:
They do actually, I saw that there is a extension for that. So if you go to our
wiki and go to our GURPS page there is a extension with a table.

So what that will
typically look like will…to activate a module. These are the various modules I
have loaded already. You just come in and this will show you all the things
that you have installed that are compatible with this rules set.

One of the things about
Fantasy Grounds is that we had several hundred add-ons that are various
products. Some of them are supplements or settings, some of them are different
monsters, it might be a adventure that is pre-done like from Adventure a Week. Or
expedition free press has one of these in here – I think I have a default
critical hit tables I’m going to load that in.

Now you will see it added
a new little section basically within my table list. So now I got my critical
hit. Here if they roll a one through four it’ll say “Yes it is a critical hit”
or a 5 or 6 will make you roll on subsequent tables. You can have like change
tables…let me see if I can get a 5 or 6 it should roll automatically on my next
one…it’s rolling lots of ones.

Okay, here we go. I
finally got a five or six and it rolled on the subsequent table and it told me
the critical effect was a parry which occurred. You get an automatically parry
on the next attack. Here you can customize that the same way. You can make your
own list basically, any kind of table you want.

Here’s a example where I
put in Dungeon Low Level CR2 creatures, if you’re just trying to figure out
here is a random encounter table. You can just put in that you want to roll
d100, and if you roll one to six makes it 1d6 dire rats so you can make all the
tables in your game of choice, that’s functionality that’s built into every
rules set.

Douglas Cole:
So if I wanted to do that is that something that’s more graphical or something
you’ll have to code XML yourself?

Doug Davison:
No, thankfully this is something you can do directly from in the system. So if
I wanted to add a new table you just come in and “Add” and here I can say “How
many rows do you want?” I want a four row table for instance. I want a
two-column.

By default it says d8, so
you can come through and say “It’s windy outside” or “It’s raining” or
“Snowing” whatever the case may be. And when you’re ready you can just say
“Roll it.” You can put in a name and call it “Weather, Randomized” a
description or whatever you want to make. This determines if you want the
result to be hidden, so as a GM if you want to roll things and not share the
result with the players. Then the GM will see it in the chat window. All the
other players won’t see that in the share window. And it’ll let you share it
out which you can always do.

Douglas Cole:
How can you change the dice? So let’s say that for example, just
hypothetically, wanted 3d6.

Doug Davison:
That’s a good question actually, 3d6…now you’re testing my ability to remember
here.

If you keep adding
rows…let’s make this a 12. I think this is a single dice roll unfortunately. To
do a 3d6 you could do your regular 3d6, by just picking up the dice and rolling
them here. AS far as having a nice look up table that’s something that this one
is really just focusing on a single dice roll. Yeah, I think that is. That is a
good extension, I’m sure that there would be…there are a lot of game systems
now that I think about it there are a lot of game systems where you are rolling
2d6 or 3d6 or whatever.

I know we have some rule sets where you roll dice and drag it to a table lookup so that would be fairly easy for us to do as well.

Note: After the interview, Doug Davison sent me an email:

Douglas Cole:
Right. For example, I don’t know if you’re familiar with the d30 Sandbox
Companion. That is something by New Big Dragon games where you could
create…it’s almost like you can automate a entire hex crawl with d30 rolls.

I actually, automated in
Excel, very very quickly, an adventure generator. There are I think ten columns
or something like that. What’s the key NPC, what’s the trigger, what’s the plot
line, blah blah blah, it’s something like five hundred trillion combinations at
the touch of a F9 key, so it seems like maybe this would be something where,
depending on how sophisticated the die-rolling could get, you could have an
encounter generator which is a series of…it just seems like especially for on
the fly stuff, it would be possible to automate something like that. “Generate
me a encounter” and bam it would go through a series of die rolls and give you
want you need.

Could it even do that and
then automatically populate in the combat tracker the creatures that it rolls
up?

Doug Davison:
It could. It’s really just how much automation you want to put in ultimately.

One of the things I’ve
been recently coding on is with Green Ronin has an advanced bestiary and they
just had there Kickstarter on as well. One of the things is really cool about
it is that it has templates. You have a NPC or series of NPCs and a series of
template you might want to apply to them. Like a skeletal version of a goblin
or a lich dog or whatever the case may be.

So that’s something that
there is a need for. You ‘re going to have to go through this series of rules
and steps to modify the base creature to a new creature, the way I coded up in
my own mindset, was to have one section where you drag and drop your templates
on one side, and drag and drop your NPCs in the other, and hit this button and
it spits out the new version on the bottom. So it’s creating new characters,
new NPCs, and all of that stuff on the fly.

Here you have your
encounters, here is your NPCs, here is an encounter, so the same thing, there
is a list of all these encounters.

This is something that at
one point in time we wanted to be able to have a list of this type of object
stored in here and when we hit this button, it’s going to do all of these
automatically. I’m just going to drop them all into the combat tracker.

All of these things could
be combined into one, the code is probably there it’s just calling the code.

From a programmer’s
prospective, you just create a extension in a certain format, and stick it in
the right folder, and it will load that extension in addition to the base rule
set, and you can have multiple extensions loaded too.

Douglas Cole:
One more GURPS question, do your program support hexes, or just squares?

Doug Davison:
It does, it supports hexes and squares.

Let me see if I have any
other maps here. So I’m going to pull up…this one is obviously…this is a GM
map. Let me grab a higher resolution. So this one is a higher resolution.

This is obviously square
grids, so first I’ll show you really quickly the square grids, you come into a
map you download from the internet: it obviously has a grid, but our program
doesn’t know anything about what size the square grid is, so you apply a layer
on top and there is a set grid layer.

So typically you go from
the top of one corner down to the bottom of another one, and it rolls our grid
over top of it. It’s really that simple, and then when you have your NPCs
moving around, then they scale and fit just perfectly.

The other thing you can do
too, if you want to make them larger or bigger on a curved token…

Douglas Cole:
That’s what those numbers are. One point seven grid squares.

Doug Davison:
Yeah, exactly. So can do all that sort of function pretty easily.

And then you can also
clear that grid off and you can set a different type of grid. Change grid to
hex grid. And this is going to look a little silly, so set the hex grid, maybe
it’s still 75 pixels if you can get to there. And then it rolls out and now you
got hex grids so as you’re moving around you’re inside the hex system.

Douglas Cole:
I think I saw you set facing on the bear earlier.

Doug Davison:
Yeah, I did actually. It comes with a lot of tokens built in. Like our
character tokens. If I were to use a top down token instead…let me get rid of
Jonah and replace him with the top down version of him, Jonah is going to be a
human female spellcaster all of a sudden.

Douglas Cole:
She got hit with with a polymorph.

Doug Davison:
So now, Jonah will…I drag Jonah to the map, as I mouse wheel, Jonah moves. And
you can zoom in our out. She’ll scale with it, now that I zoom in and out.
That’s called a locking token scale, and you can zoom in and out, and as I
zoom, if I want her to fit perfectly in one of those hex grids I can make her
bigger or smaller, and once I lock it, then all tokens of that size will shrink
or grow in relation to the map. So that makes it real easy to move around.

Douglas Cole:
So one thing that’s with GURPS at least, because it’s typically a one-yard hex
– and this is not all GURPS all the time. It just happens to be the system that
I think in. One of the deals though, is I wrote a book about grappling, I take
Jonah and throw him down, all of a sudden he’s two hexes long.

Is there a facility for
multiple tokens depending on posture or anything like that? Without going
through all the different choices that you just did.

Doug Davison:
I’m not familiar with one, other than you could shrink them or grow them a
little bit. So you could switch out the token, if you had two versions of the
token, and had one of them with him prone.

Douglas Cole:
Exactly! I was wondering if you could have Jonah with your top down token, your
prone token, your kneeling token, and you could just toggle between them
without having to do click drag, switch, whatever. That would be kind of
awesome.

Doug Davison:
Yeah. Definitely, from a programmer’s perspective, what you would probably do
is you would make – instead of just having one token spot where Jonah is. You
see he has a single token option?

I would imagine you could
probably add a tab with all the different lists of tokens and you’d link that
to a script. You can do various things, I want the main option, to go prone,
stand, kneel, all that sort of thing. You could play around with those and link
that code up. And say, go back to the base character that token is used, switch
what graphic is rendered.

Douglas Cole:
Okay, so that would be something where if you wanted to have a table of four or
five different . . . you’d have the top down token that’s standing, got a prone
one with blood in the background or something, which would be unconscious or
dead, right click the token, pull up the token menu and boom, click click done.

Doug Davison:
Absolutely.

Douglas Cole:
You’d obviously need to script it. That’s really neat. Honestly, this has
been…Fog of War or vision blocking or illumination or any of the classic…

Doug Davison:
What we typically have is…

Douglas Cole:
You mentioned masking earlier.

Doug Davison:
Here you go in and you’ve got your layers, it’s a layer on top. You see where
it says ‘enable mask.’ From a GM’s perspective you drop a map on it, then mask
on it, the GM can see where everything is. It’s kind of like a fogged-out
version of it. The player won’t see anything until you cut it away. As you cut
away portions, it’ll expose that part for the player.

They don’t see the same
level of detail, in the background that’s the GM’s version. In the background
they have a bit more information.

As I expose more…that was
the wrong idea to do. It takes just a second and it cuts away that part of the
map. You can also free-form cut too. We figured most of the time you’re going
to be drawing nice kind of squares, but you can hold down your shift key and do
circles or whatever the case may be, and you can expand out that way.

One of the features that
is one wish list, I know that some other virtual tabletops have, is the
lightning linked to the specific characters. So if they’re carrying torches, or
maybe they rely on knowledge about if the character has dark vision or whatever
and locked sight on doors.

We’ve opted for…what we
think is a simpler set up, you just load a map, the same as if you were playing
tabletop. There is a wall there, you character from where they are located
can’t see through that wall.

Douglas Cole:
Right. So there is a certain amount of player agency to it.

But you could also probably
link an unmasking 20 ft circle that was linked to a token.

And that would be a
cheesy, but effective way of doing a circle of light.

Cheesy is the wrong word,
it would be simplistic, but effective. You’ve got good vision up to this point,
and that would be kind of neat. Another thing that you could probably wind up
doing because I see that you got a opacity feature built into the GM map, is if
you had perfect vision for 10 or 20 ft and decent vision for 30 or 40 ft you
could probably scale down the opacity to represent penalties and stuff.

Doug Davison:
Absolutely. Let me show you real quick this is another one of the GM features
that is pretty nice.

As an example if you’re
going to set up a encounter in advance…let’s shrink this a little bit more.
Let’s say as they enter this room you want to have that famous encounter with a
dire bat and two black bears this time.

You can see on the fly I
change how many tokens there are. I’m going to preplace these in advance. Here
is where the dire bat would start in that combat encounter, and maybe in the
next room I’m picking up and dragging the token to start. So that would allow
me to load them, and preload them in, and when I come back out and delete all
my foes.

Again, when you enter that
room, it knows that this is pre-linked with that map, and that will save
between sessions. So I close off, I’ve done it the day before or whatever, I
just hit this add to the combat tracker and it automatically places them for me
where they start out on the map.

Douglas Cole:
And they are invisible.

Doug Davison:
They are invisible. What I can do in the background, again, he’s in the same
room, I can share them out and make them visible on a per-…let me see if I can
make both screens work, I’m going to make the dire bat visible so you just
click on that and it shares it. Zoom out a little bit.

Douglas Cole:
I just realized how big that dire bat was…that is a ginormous bat.

Doug Davison:
You can do it individually by turning them on or off. You can make everything
visible, or invisible.

Then the player, the nice
thing about that. Sorry, it’s a little bit more toggling when your showing the
player and GM view. The thing that the player can do is say “I want to do a
cone attack” so they’re going to do a cone…

Douglas Cole:
Ahh, built-in cone attack.

Doug Davison:
Yeah. You do that sort of stuff. You’ve got…

Douglas Cole:
Can you do different angles, I’m sorry I didn’t see.

Doug Davison:
So to start over you, say corners, you can do a cone, a circle, or a square, there
is definitely one of the cooler features, but it does it in your dice color. I
have a character with blue dice so if you had three or four players connected
it, it’ll do their effects it in their own colors.

Douglas Cole:
Cool. That is a 90 degree cone, can you do a 45 degree cone?

Doug Davison:
Right now, this is a Pathfinder one and the cones are always set…

Douglas Cole:
Always quarters. Okay.

Doug Davison:
If you have, like in Savage Worlds it has different shapes of cones in
different format. That would have to be something built into that specific rule
set to support it.

This one here, you got
those, and squares, if you’ve got something that emanates, you can set it, pick
it up and move it around where it is on the map. So if it’s a fog that drifts
or whatever, you can move it as time goes on. It’ll tell you the size in that
game system.

So the nice things, are
that you got this character, which let’s see if I have someone who has a attack
here, normally you’d use a spell, but I’ve got a fighter loaded unfortunately.

So let say they wanted to
target these three creatures. So I’m holding down control and then just
clicking on the target. Let’s say I do an acid arrow against each of those. So
it rolled an attack against each target that I had targeted, and tell me which
ones hit or missed or whatever.

When I roll my damage it
does the same thing and applies it.

If I were to look on the
GMs perspective now, there should be some damage applied. The black bear was
damaged for 6 and the dire bat was damaged for 6. But the other black bear was
missed, so no damage was applied.

So when you’re doing your
fireballs or that sort of thing, it’s very easy to target everything that
you’re going to shot at. It’ll automatically deselect the ones you missed and
you’ll just roll your damage.

The spell functionality is
something we invested a decent amount of time to. Again, to go back to your
player, Jonah, I think, is a wizard, so here you got a fireball attack, so you
do that same thing, but it’s going to do 5d6 damage and it’s a reflex save of
DC 17. I’ll do it one more time here, if I target each of those three
characters. The first thing is to make sure you’ll hit ‘em all, then you target
them – let me move those out of the way – when you roll your attack, it rolled
the dice, and it’s behind the window, but that middle bear is no longer
targeted, it made its reflex save. As I roll my 5d6 damage, it’s going to be
fire damage, so it’ll also check resistances. So if the creature had resistance
to fire, it’ll automatically deduct that for you. It takes a lot of those
minutiae out of the game and allows you to play faster. The characters are at a
different level.

Douglas Cole:
I see that your little power bar has dropped to half and the color coding.

Doug Davison:
That is an option you can turn on or off, and if you want to share it with your
players. As an option, you can come in your preferences and you can say what
level of detail do you want.

Here’s the tokens for the
GM. Do you want to show effects (you can turn them on or off)? That’s another
thing, if a spell has a sleep or dazed effect or whatever, it’ll automatically
place that as an indicator telling you that the creature is dazed or whatever.

You want to share that
with the players, you want to share the health.

Here is a tool tip, now it
will only show the health when I however over it. Here is a example, you can
just show a dot, it’ll change colors to orange or red or whatever and then off
or a tool tip. As you hover over it it’ll say “I’m healthy.” This person is an
enemy, you can change it to a bar or dot or tool tip. Heavy damage, light
damage, moderate damage.

Douglas Cole:
Cool. That’s certainly neat. I guess that’s…is there anything else kicking
around on the game that you really want to show us?

Doug Davison:
One other thing that’s really pretty neat. That gives you the basics, there is
a ton of functionally that I can talk about for hours and hours and bore
everybody to death.

But the library is one of
the things that we really think is critical.

As your building
characters – let close down a bunch of stuff here to make our screen a little
clear.

One of the things that’s
really nice is when you are building your encounters in advance, or one of your
characters gets a new level, and you want to add a new ability for instance.

I came come over here, is
it a feat? Yeah, it’s a feat. I can right-click and say “Create Item” and I can
say “Fancy Dance Move” that I just learned and describe what Fancy Dance Move
there. You can put the game description there or your notes there.

If there isn’t support in
the system already within Fantasy Grounds, that’s not a limitation, you can key
in stuff as needed, drag and drop from outside sources.

But . . . if it’s
something that’s in from the Pathfinder SRD you go to your basic rules section
and pull up your feats. There is a list of various feats, you can scroll
through, and each one of these has got the description from the SRD, what that
specific feat does and what it means when you have or don’t have it.

But you can also search,
“I’ve got a power something” as you type the first couple of characters it
narrows the list down so now I’ve got Empower Spell. Now the character has it
so in game time if they want to use it they just click on it.

That’s your basically
functionality. On equipment, it’s the same sort of thing, if you have a inventory
item and you use it.

I want to pull up a new
weapon I just bought here you can look and see different types of weapons, or I
can pull up a search and say it’s a spear so type the first couple of
characters and now…is it a long spear, short spear, or whatever. You drag it
over, it’s a lot of drag and drop functionality.

Here it has your
encumbrance, it’ll update your encumbrance for you automatically. Your basic
stats and critical modifier.

When you’re ready, if you
look on the actions, he now has two versions of a spear attack that they can
use. They can do a generic attack where it just uses there melee modifiers, or
they can do a thrown version, so you can toggle it so it’ll determine what
it’ll use. It’ll use the DEX modifier or Strength modifier.

Spells are the same thing,
you can drag and drop spells over from the library. You’ve got some of the
nicer things I think are the bestiaries, which I think help. All of your
demons. All of your dragons, giants, whatever. You have them kind of at your
fingertips with all their attacks preloaded.

Whenever you have an
encounter, like Adventure a Week guys, what they did on theirs, it’ll put a new
tab. This is my custom campaign, there are the monsters I’m running, but if I
want to see the monsters in this module, here is all the monsters that are pre-statted
out when they bought that module.

It’s the same thing if you
were to buy the PDF, they’re all pre-keyed in and this has all the same content
and save you the time for entry of having to go in and do those. Here you got
extra descriptions, here they have a strategy of what that creature is going to
do when you fight it. That’s a skeletal wolf for instances and the token,
they’ve linked it in with our tokens.

Douglas Cole:
Neat. That ties into…before I go to that last kind of question . . . so what
are you working on right now that you think is something that is future feature
(as opposed to a creature feature or maybe they are the same thing). That your
program is going to be implementing when you successfully code it?

Doug Davison:
We’ve got few things in the works and the biggest thing right now…we just made
it through a really big push that put in a ton of new features to manage your
entire party at a glance, party inventory funds, sharing experience, that sort
of automation for running a entire party of characters, in addition to the
individual character awards and so forth.

We’ve reached a good
stopping point, we’ve done a lot of consolidation of our older rule sets. We
have what we call a core RPG that’s a very basic vanilla system that you can
use to roll dice, share maps, images, tokens, that sort of thing. It’s kind of
in a game agnostic fashion, but the nice thing about it is we’ve also recoded a
number of the rule sets to build off of that one, so now we can look at adding
a special feature or function, we can add to that core rule set and it’ll
automatically roll out to each of those other game systems whenever that makes
sense.

So we don’t have to recode
it and say “What does that look like in Castles and Crusades, or what do that
look like in Pathfinder, or GURPS, or whatever.

If GURPS – and I believe
GURPS was built off of the core RPG, it was rebuilt basically to use the same
features – so if we add a town manager feature or a shop builder, or something
like that – and there are actually extensions that do that that a user has
built.

As we add those it’ll roll
out to everything all at once.

The other thing that we’re
doing right now is we’re trying to get this all packaged up and ready to go on
Steam. So we think that…it took us about a year to go through their greenlight
process, and to get the necessary traction for them to approve it, so now it’s
been approved and greenlit.

We need to take a break from
doing enhancements just for a little while, and rack this up with Steam so we
can expand it out to the six million or so users that are always active on
Steam any time of day. Hopefully that will explode us from our user base now
that’s in the 20,000s – I think we have 27,000 thousand users – to really get
it in the living room. That’s what I’m really excited about. The Steam machines
have the option of running on your TV, and using consoles type remotes and wireless
mouse and keyboard, then people could really seriously be playing dungeons and
dragons around there living room with their old college buddies or whatever the
case may be.

Douglas Cole:
That’s actually a good point in a way, is one of the things that I really do
like about…for example, Roll20 on Hangouts, which is a system that you know we
play a lot, or Hangouts in general, is the video. You got people on the bottom
of the screen talking like you and I are talking. Is that a feature that is or
will be enabled on fantasy Grounds?

Doug Davison:
It’s one of the things that…we actually use Google Hangouts or Skype – Normally
I use Skype;  I think John uses Google
Hangouts.

We use those same
features, it’s not integrated with the app it’s not a web application, but we
run it side by side.

I think for running
anything in virtual tabletop, any virtual tabletop you can look at, I highly
recommend getting just another monitor, if you’re running on your laptop, plug
a monitor in your laptop, so you got the extra screen real estate. I like to
keep Skype or something running on the side, and you can choose if you want
video, or don’t want video and keep Fantasy Grounds focused on the game
content.

We felt like it would pull
us away from the automation and some of the other functions and features we
could be adding. To do something that frankly, it would come out worse than
what the professionals could do from Skype and Google. So we don’t want to
compete with them and those things are always going to be getting better, and
we don’t want to limit ourselves.

For example, let’s say we
want Google+, it’s really good right now, but who’s to say that another service
won’t come out a year later that’s better and faster and has more functions and
features and whatever else.

Right now, by having it
separate it allows people to choose what they are comfortable with.

Douglas Cole:
Sure. So you mentioned it exists on computers and is going to be available
through Steam, I assume it’s not going to be free, if I have myself and six
players, how much is it going to run me and them?

Doug Davison:
Sure.

There are a couple of
different options, typically our older model was everyone needed a license, so
you would have GM licenses and Player licenses. The difference between those
two licenses were could you do content creation other than your character sheet?

If you only wanted to do
your character sheet, run your character in some combat, with some general
notes and track items that you have then the player version was your choice.

That today we have on sale
for $24, there is one license, there is no subscription. Every version that
we’ve come out with all the way to Fantasy Grounds 1 and even before John and I
took over the company, has free upgrades to the latest version that we have
available. We’ve done that since 2005, every edition, thousands and thousands of
hours of code have gone out to people who have bought it at any point in time.

The GM license allows you
to host a game, and have players connect to it. You get all the campaign
management functionality, you get the ability to create your own stories and NPCs,
pull in your own images and maps, build your own library of content. Those run
$39 right now and each person would buy one.

We do have some GMs who
have players who don’t…they don’t think their players would spring for a
service like this, or they choose to take the burden on themselves, they buy
something called an ultimate license and it’s $150, but then the players
connect for free and that way if they have…some people will do that if they
have multiple groups of players they’ll run or if they’re always inviting new
players to the game, they don’t have to worry about cost being a barrier entry
to their games.

But I will say that
regardless of whether you could talk your gaming group into playing on a VTT .
. . one of the things that when I first came to it, I couldn’t talk my local
group into playing, because I was moving from Champagne-Urbana (in Illinios)
back to Kentucky, where I grew up, and I had a fantastic gaming group in
Illinois’, but some of them just don’t have computers or they didn’t want to
play it online, so I bought Fantasy Grounds as a GM license myself, and I
connected and played with people I’ve never ever met in person – even to this
day I’ve never met them in person – and I’ll say I made the same lasting,
bonding friendships that I’ve made with people at the local gaming store.

There are a ton of users
out there, and a bunch of other players who have gamed at different times, and
all throughout the world. I’ve got people in the United Kingdom that are
playing, and Brazil, all over the world. I see people every once and a while
people from Timbuktu, that’s really a…there really is a Timbuktu, and people
really do game there.

It’s interesting to see,
and there’s tons of games out there, and Fantasy Grounds is one option, but any
virtual tabletop would be surprised to see to what degree you can really play
the game and have the same sort of experience and what better experience you’d
have in person.

Douglas Cole:
I think that brings us to the…I think you summarized it well, the future of
virtual tabletops and online gaming in general, is you’ve characterized it as
just broader. There are tons of people that are gaming. Lots of availability.
Link up to almost any game as long as you obey some basic social contract
rules.

And in a way I guess the
Fantasy Grounds has started it, but do you ever think that the publishing of
games and the gaming software will be more closely linked?

Obviously the Adventure a
Week module, where you can buy a digital adventure, and just pop right into
Fantasy Grounds, is the closest I’ve seen to that. It’s a fully implemented
module.

Doug Davison:
That’s definitely something we see a lot of opportunity in the future.

We’ve had conversations
with the guys at Paizo and Wizards of the Coast as well. Adventures and
modulses. We’ve built a lot of those libraries of stuff ourselves. So it’s
definitely something we do with other publishers.

We’ve got 16 o 17
different publishers we do that with. So they could be something from a
adventure module or library modules are really nice. Call of Cthulhu have tons
of splatbooks type of thing, you can go through and read all about a specific
setting, maybe it’s a time or era or whatever and put it directly in the tools.
So people don’t have to have a PDF version and key it all in, or whatever,
because really keying in the data can become a barrier to playing online because
it takes a whole lot of time.

Douglas Cole:
That’s actually the next question, before I give you the last word.

It seems to me the real
barrier to entry for people who are not XML coders, would be some kind of
automated scripting tool or tools that would enable Joe User, like myself.

I’m 42 years old, I can do
some coding. I used to. But I don’t know XML. I think the last real coding
experience I had might have been visual basic.

I’m sure I could do
coding, learn how to do it, but I’ve got a little girl, and I’ve got other
things to do other than write programs.

I would love to be able to
go “Boom, Boom, Boom” and do monsters or do characters and upload maps, or have
some customized rules or I really like the new firearms rules that Hans-Christian
Vortisch published in Pyramid and wouldn’t it be nice to go “Click, click,
click, drag, go,” and remove that barrier to entry for the casual gamer.

Doug Davison:
Absolutely. That’s really got to be key, that’s where I think that Fantasy
Grounds really stands shoulders above a lot of the competition.

Especially in the areas
where we have game systems that are supported, either in the official rule sets
that we’ve developed, or with one that the community members have developed.
You get so much out of the box, where it has all that functionality. It might
not have every single feature of a game system implemented. But it will get you
up and running in no time.

If you look at that and
you look at what is it like to play that same game around a table, you don’t
need everything to be automated, and I would caution against that – especially
in the very beginning. You just need to be able to roll the dice. Even if you
were to game on a system there was no system to support for whatsoever, just
load up the core RPG and share your images and your maps and your stories, and
then the dice is still going to be..you’re going to roll the dice just like you
would around the table.

That shouldn’t really
limit you from doing that. I wouldn’t 
encourage people to look at this and say “Well, it can do all these
things in Fantasy Grounds” and the very first thing they try to do is code?

No, that’s not the right
approach, and in fact I would recommend you get a system, you look at all the
ones out there, is there a system supported that I do want to play.

I would encourage you to
play in the game system for a while or play in that sandbox because that will
also show you how things are implemented. You don’t want to start developing
your own version until you see OK, well, this works really really well in this
system. Let’s see how they did it in Pathfinder and I can see how it would make
sense here. You don’t want to jump in the deep end from the very beginning, you
want to get your feet under you to begin with and using the features that are
there, and then look and see what do I really need to expand and ask yourself
those questions as you go forward.

Douglas Cole:
Exactly.

As I’m contemplating my
own campaign, what I’m going to want to be able to do is, either within Fantasy
Grounds, or some other program, I’m going to want to map.

And very clearly I can
bring in a map, I can darken it up with masking, I can put a hex grid on it.

Then I’ll have to import
characters, and I know that there is a GURPS Character Assistant to Fantasy
Grounds tool which I saw online, which is kind of awesome.

Doug Davison:
That other thing is it’ll give you a blank character sheet for a GURPS
character, and you just fill in your own stats, all of those are typeable
areas. And it looks like they coded them up so you could do your 3d6 dice rolls
automatically.

Douglas Cole:
Yeah. I saw that. I actually got a note – that someone logged into the YouTube
feed and left a comment – saying that an upgrade for all the different features
that you and I have been discussing are in the works for the latest GURPS
rules.

Doug Davison:
Sometimes, you’ll be amazed – and I’m always amazed at what the community
members do today, a lot of them are professional programmers, or graphic
artists, or both. This is their hobby, the development of these automated
sophisticated systems, they get as much joy out of these as they do playing the
game sometimes.

Sometimes just getting on to
the forums and saying “Hey, this would be really cool if you did that.” If they
have a audience for it, it’s amazing what people will put together.

I’ve seen people write…one
guy wrote a extension which was very very clever, someone made a suggestion on
the forum and said “Wouldn’t it be cool if you could speak in the chat window
in different languages, and all the people that knew that language on their
character sheet could read it.”

So he made something so
you could speak in Elvish or Dwarven or whatever, and you change which language
you’re talking and it writes out Elvish-looking script into the chat window if
you don’t know Elvish. And if you do
know Elvish it puts a little tag so that you know that you’re speaking in
Elvish, but you can read the text clear.

How cool is that? My mind
is always boggled seeing what people do and how creative and how talented
members of our community are. And a lot of it comes into the tool.

A lot of times…one of our
users made all sorts of stuff, he actually skinned out our 4th
edition rules set and a lot of our graphics. He’s actually created stuff and
said “Hey, this is what I’ve done for my own personal use. If you guys like it,
feel free to use it.” And so we’ve said, “Okay” and we’ve integrated it with
our system and shared it out with all of our users and now it’s a option. They
can say I want the “stone” version with its skin.

That sort of thing gets rolled
up a lot, especially if they are going to invest time developing something like
that, they just want to see it used.

Douglas Cole:
Right. The amount of money I’ll get from any one Pyramid article or my
Technical Grappling book is fairly miniscule relative to the satisfaction of
getting a good play report.

Doug Davison:
Absolutely. We do have the option, if people want to sell something. We had one
player that built…we didn’t have templates implemented, so he wanted to have
all the summon monsters in the table, so he went through and entered all the
NPCs and statted them all out. “Hey, you guys, I use this for my game, do you
think that the users would like it.”

So I said “Yeah, sure.”
And helped him get it loaded up to our store and he sells and every quarter I
send him royalties on that. So we have that option if people choose to go that
route, or if people want to share them for free they can do that too. I think
we try to cater to both audiences.

Douglas Cole:
That’s really cool. So I always give my guest the last word, and I think it’s
about wrap-up time, we’ve been chatted for a bit and I’m very interested in the
Fantasy Grounds and I’m going to have to figure out which VTT I’m going to be
using, and I know I’m going to be using one because I don’t have a gaming group
here.

As we wrap up here, what’s
the last word that you want to give people who are interested in Fantasy
Grounds or VTTing or if you want to talk about anything gaming related (just
not religion or politics).

Doug Davison:
[laughs] I’ll avoid the religion or politics, although sometimes gaming get’s just
as heated I suppose.

Douglas Cole:
I was thinking about the same thing, yeah.

Doug Davison:
I would ultimately say that a lot of the systems you can go in and download and
try them. I would urge people to try out Fantasy Grounds, I hope that they
would. Our demo is free, they can download it and run two instances of it and
connect to each other. It’ll give them a taste of if the application is good
for them.

We also have a ton of
YouTube videos, where they can go and follow along.

I would just encourage
people to . . . if they haven’t tried virtual tabletop gaming yet to give it a
shot.

And try multiple things.
Don’t just try one game system or one virtual tabletop and say “It’s not for
me” because the experience is significantly different from us or Roll20 or d20
Pro or MapTools, each one of those environments caters to a slightly
differently audience I think. Some of them are easier to get off the ground and
running, but others have more features and you need to find the one that fits
for you and I think it’s worth doing the investment if you take a week or two
and try all the different ones before you make a decision.

But if you do join Fantasy
Grounds you’ll find that there is a very friendly community and we would be
happy to have you.

Douglas Cole:
Okay, I want to thank you for your time and joining us and the detailed
walkthrough of Fantasy Grounds. I enjoyed it.

It was good to see the
GURPS support that’s out there, and I’ll link to that to both the wiki and to
the video that you showed me where the GCA export, because honestly for GURPS
making a character is a very front-loaded expedience.

Swords and Wizardry or the
old d6 Star Wars – 5 minutes and you’ve got a character and you’re ready to
play.

With GURPS – you can do that, but often you’re buying,
and optimizing, and then you’ve got a pretty good character ready to go, and
then you can just play.

But to go through and do
GURPS character assistant and BOOM here is a import, and you can drag and roll
dice and all that stuff is very exciting capability for front-loaded systems.

Doug Davison:
Yeah.

Douglas Cole:
So it’s something that I certainly learned about Fantasy Grounds, and thank you
for walking me through it, but again, thank you for your time, and as new
features or anything come out, then the Firing Squad always has a spot on the
wall.

Doug Davison:
Great.

Douglas Cole:
Thanks a lot.